Dr Binder's new book on his Lunar Prospector mission and NASA's disfunctional culture...

While this is partly a technical story, it is much more a human interest story about how an individual can, with persistence and a belief in the value of what one is doing, overcome all odds and obstacles and achieve an impossible goal. Further, like the Lunar Prospector Mission itself, this book was written to expose to the American taxpayer the basic flaws of an ever increasingly incompetent NASA and its major aerospace contractors.

Though the Lunar Prospector Mission was a small, inexpensive, unmanned, orbital mapping mission, the reader will, via the author's experiences in conducting his mission, become intimately acquainted with the inefficient and self-serving activities of the entrenched NASA bureaucracy and the big aerospace companies. As such, the reader will come to understand how NASA's increasing incompetence led to 1) the destruction of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia and their crews, 2) the loss of the 1992 Mars Observer, the 1999 Mars Climate Observer, the 1999 Mars Polar Lander, 3) the never-to-be-finished International Space Station that is already five times over its $8 billion budget and a decade over its original schedule, and 4) many similar NASA failures that have cost the taxpayers tens of billions of dollars and have already taken 14 human lives.

The reader will also find that the goals of the mission, originally conceived as a private effort, were to demonstrate that when missions are conducted in a commercial mode, outside of NASA rather than as a government bureaucracy-driven program, the costs are reduced by up to a factor of 10 and the time scale of development is cut by a factor of two or more.
**************
(I'd also cite DC-X as another non-NASA mission that was fast, cheap and effective)

-p